Food & Climate
Scientists have created a transformative new bee superfood from genetically modified yeast that can uplift declining bee populations and protect global food security.
Honeybee populations have been steadily declining over the recent decades, facing unprecedented challenges such as habitat loss changing weather patterns, intensive farming patterns, air pollution and excessive use of pesticides.
The rapid decline threatens not only bee populations but global food security, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, a third of the world’s food production depends on bees.
Until now, pollen substitutes have fallen short of providing honeybees with all the nutrients they need to healthily survive.
Scientists at Oxford have developed a new supplement using a genetically modified yeast, Yarrowia lipolytica. This yeast produces essential nutrients called sterols, which are naturally found in pollen but missing from the conventional supplements beekeepers provide, typically made from protein flour, sugar, and oils, according to the recearch that seen by “Food & Climate” .
Helping bee population growth
Based on the researchers’ findings the honeybee colonies that were fed a diet enriched with Yarrowia lipolytica had 15 times more baby bees that made it to adulthood in comparison to those given diets without the nutrients.
“When the bees have a complete nutrition they should be healthier and less susceptible to disease,” Professor Geraldine Wright said to the BBC.
The researchers say the supplement could be available to farmers within two years potentially reducing competition between bee species for natural floral resources and helping bee population growth.
In the meantime, there is a lot to be done to continue supporting bees such as planting diverse wildflowers, reducing pesticide usage, preserving natural habitats, and promoting sustainable farming. By creating nutrient-rich foraging areas, honeybees and other pollinators can thrive, helping to maintain resilient ecosystems and the secure global food production in the face of climate change.
Honeybees consume floral pollen, which provides proteins, fats, carbohydrates and micronutrients.
Increasingly, a combination of changes in climate, land use and agricultural practices is limiting the access of honeybees to sufficient and diverse floral resources.
Nutritional deficiencies increase the susceptibility of bees to disease and colony collapse and contribute to the growing rate of honeybee colony losses.
Loss of pollinators in turn reduces crop yields and raises the costs of food production.
What are the Sterols?
In the past 40 years, beekeepers have adopted the practice of feeding artificial pollen substitutes when natural forage is insufficient or when bees are kept at high densities.
However, commercially available pollen substitutes composed of protein flour, sugars and oils are not nutritionally complete feeds for honeybees. Such diets are missing essential sterols found in floral pollen that are necessary for colony health and growth.
Sterols are a structurally diverse class of tetracyclic triterpenoids that are ubiquitously important for eukaryotic cell function, including for membrane architecture, hormone biosynthesis and signalling.
Unlike other animals, insects and marine invertebrates have lost the ability to synthesize endogenous sterols and instead acquire them from the diet.
Most insects produce cholesterol (CHOL) by dealkylating dietary sterols. By contrast, honeybees have lost the ability to dealkylate sterols and instead directly use sterols obtained from the diet as membrane inserts and as precursors for ecdysteroid hormones.
Most of the pollen sterols used by bees are not available in quantities that could be fed to bee colonies on a commercial scale, which makes it unfeasible to create a nutritionally complete feed that is a substitute for pollen. Sterols are consumed by nurse-aged worker honeybees from stored pollen (bee bread). The sterols accumulate in their mandibular glands and are transferred to worker, queen and drone larvae through glandular secretions. Sterol diversity is high in pollen18, but only a few key sterols seem to be taken up by worker bees in the gut, according to “ Nature“.